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Comment by akhilcacharya | Hacker News Reader

What exactly are these machines used for?

Electron apps /s

Image processing needs as many cores and RAM as you can give it, and local will beat AWS-esque until we get fiber everywhere.

You install VirtualBox or Ganeti on it, create 100 VMs for various purposes for your company. Build Agents, Spikes/PoCs, any and all purposes. Its like a cheap local cloud.

Interesting - what differentiates workstation-class machines like these from dedicated server hardware? They're marketed differently, right?

The fact the machine could sit on your desktop without causing you hearing damage.

I honestly have no idea why "home" servers are so bloody loud. My desktop is more powerful than any of the machines at my company and it doesn't sound like a jet turbine--even at full load. And even when our servers aren't fully spun up, the fans are so loud and droning even at lower RPMs!

Is it an issue of "overpowered" fans (for really hot rooms), or is it really just an issue of "cheap as crap" fans by OEMs?

It's the physics of the volume of air that is being moved by the fan. A 2U tall fan has to spin twice as fast to move the same volume of air as a 4U tall fan. A 4U is roughly the same dimensions as a full height desktop or workstation. They probably employ lots of 2U servers.

All of our servers are full towers, not rackmount, and still sound like jet turbines.

I used to use them as hardware for a test and development OpenStack cloud. On a decent spec'd Z620 I could simulate a full OpenStack cloud, and even boot quite a few VMs inside it for end to end testing.

Do you generally run openstack on host OS itself or within VM? Or to clarify - I have noticed some problems when Openstack runs inside virtualized environment, but if it directly runs on host OS itself, it seems to be fine.

With OpenStack it is generally recommended to run it on bare metal boxes. Likely, the issues you're running into are network based (or running an SDN over an SDN).

Virtualised control plane is totally fine. Next step is containerised OpenStack.

CAD, 3D workloads, 4K/8K video editing, stuff like that. They're great for running dozens of VMs especially if you're running with SSDs and a non-integrated RAID card. The integrated RAID chip on the z820/z620 is horrible.

I use my z820 and z620 for OpenShift, VMs & running my 6 monitors.

I thought people used OSX/Win for video editing?

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